Global Society?

The idea of a global civil society implies that of a global, or cosmopolitan, society as such, contrary to the previously mentioned Parsonian insistence on "boundary maintenance." Resistance to the idea of a global society stems from both methodological and ethicopolitical considerations. John Rawls, for instance, explicitly took the self-contained "closed society"—that is, the nation-state or something similar—as the appropriate abstract entity within which to develop his original theory of justice, which advocates unequal distribution of goods only to the extent to which such distribution will benefit the least advantaged member of that society. This intentional limitation of scope was a methodological preference of his, as it had been of so many of his predecessors in social theory; but it also helped enable him, when he later undertook to analyze international issues in his The Law of Peoples (1999), to reject the application...